Bluetooth Proxy For Home Assistant

Long story

I’ve ran into lots of documentation for hardware and details, but poor overview = lots of time wasted. LLMs didn’t really help.

Short story

Goal: control 3 bluetooth controll LED strips from Home Assistant

Challenge: Home Assistant is running off-site, needs a gateway/proxy

Expectations: Something as simple as Zigbee2MQTT with a ZigStar as the “serial” device

Resources: 11 Raspberry Pis

Useful: MQTT Explorer

Solution

[LED list]  ---(BT)---> [RPi]<TheengsyGateway> ---(IP)---> <MQTT> <---(IP)--- <Home Asssitant>

While I can see packages in MQTT Explorer, nothing gets picked up in Home Assistant.

• The TheengsGateway publishes a lot of packages:
  • I don’t see anything for the ~20+ Google devices (mostly chromecast)
  • I see a list of Samsung TVs, but they’re also not “discovered” in Home Assistant
• I do see a device_tracker entry (topic) for my Tile under homeassistant/device_tracker/, but that’s not visible in HA anywhere :-/

All of these carry RSSI packages, so that’s at least a sensor for these devices?

Have not gotten around to playing with the LED lists, yet.